Contrary to popular opinion, the best end-of-year marketing strategy isn’t the summary holiday campaign highlighting your great brand or year-long triumphs. In fact, the best end of year campaign is a two-fold campaign. First, do that – run your triumphant victory lap congratulating yourself, wishing people a merry holiday season, and reminding them why you’re fabulous. And two, run a re-engagement campaign.

Arguably, the latter is tougher than the former. Everyone how to do the first. Most of you are probably scratching your heads at the second, and understandably so. The first question that pops to mind is “why.” Why would you run any serious campaign during the time of the year most people are totally checked out?

Let’s take a step back and see where you are in the grand scheme of your yearly marketing calendar action items. Here it is: you’re done. You’ve at the tail end of your yearly marketing campaign. At this point, you’ve got a couple of philanthropic campaigns to send out and the annual newsletter or holiday greeting. That’s it. This isn’t hard and most of it should have probably already been sorted out. At this point, it’s in the pile of outgoing campaigns with very little planning left.

Tis The Season … To Escape Long Lines And Wait Times With Your Phone.

You might still be resisting, thinking, “but most people are checked out for the year. Why bother now.” This is true, most people are checked out for the rest of the year. Here’s what they’re doing: they’re stuck in long lines for last minute Christmas shopping, they’re stuck at holiday parties, family gatherings, long drives or flights for getaways or obligatory family time. I think you’re starting to get the idea…

This means they’re on their smartphones with the time and availability to glance at something or engage in a way that might not have been possible before with more demands on their time in even the micro-moments of our lives. The truth is, you’re probably in the same situation as your audience. You’re probably doing the same thing – in lines, stuck en route. This is the time to be sending out re-engagement campaigns with a mobile-friendly email marketing platform. If you’re using Benchmark Email, you can do all of that that through Benchmark’s mobile app.

Things Often Just Get Glanced Over, Because That’s Life.

To re-engage, look at which campaigns and strategies didn’t work in the past. Which campaigns didn’t get opened or clicked on? Try re-sending those individual to subscribers with a possible personalized note if you can. If you’ve got a long list of subscribers, try segmenting that into tiers of how to re-engage with first. It might seem tedious, but the one-off personalized reach out is going to work a lot more wonder than a generic re-send.

Sometimes You’ve Got To Say It Again … In A Way That’s Going To Matter More.

And another way to re-engage is to look at the same list of failed engagement and assess the way the material was presented. Was there a really important campaign that you’d love a segment of subscribers to read and react too…but they just didn’t? It’s probably not what you said but how you said it. Try changing the subject line around, or repositioning the data to humanize the information. In most cases, there’s just too much info and not enough call to action. For something to be impactful and actionable, keep it simple: tell people what it is and tell them why they should care.

Make People Feel Important. It Always Works.

If you’re hitting the wall with re-engagement efforts, the solution is to make people feel important. Tell them you’d like to include their review, their opinion, or get a quote as part of a new advertising angle or content piece. The idea is to include them in some way that makes them feel heard and recognized. It also gives them a direct action item they can quickly partake in. In other words, simple tasks work best especially when they’re paired with rewards. Now, of course, this only works if you’ve invested time and imagination into building a brand that your audience will recognize as a platform or industry leader.

The overarching idea is to take advantage of the pockets of time left in the year to dust up any lingering campaigns and get them off the shelf and into the send shoot. You want to start of 2017 with a clear plate and this allows you to do just that. It also keeps people looped in through the holidays so you’re not working twice as hard roping everyone back in after the New Year.